


the measure of the measure

by angularmomentum



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: A/B/O, F/M, Heatfic, M/M, stanley cup victory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-25
Updated: 2018-06-25
Packaged: 2019-05-28 10:36:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15047021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angularmomentum/pseuds/angularmomentum
Summary: One day this might be funny.One day Sasha might tell his children about it, how he was already charring from the inside before he ever even touched the cup.One day he might even tell Nicke.





	the measure of the measure

**Author's Note:**

> A prompt on twitter from some enablers led to this but me being me, I definitely dove too deep.
> 
> Thanks to everyone who read this over, and as always to Wade and Jolach for the cheerleading. This would not be finished without an invaluable edit from Jolach, please thank them for what’s coherent.
> 
> Click to the bottom for more info!

It didn't hit him right away.

These things never did, when it came to Nicke. He was as much a constant as he had been for eleven years: a nightmare, a big, eternal presence, a weight in the back of Sasha’s awareness, an occasional visitor in times of need, a friend.

He wasn’t Sasha’s any more than he was anyone else’s. They didn’t do that, on this team. They didn’t have one for each.

Nicke had never triggered him before. It had never been Nicke, specifically, who sent him over the edge, plummeting into heat like a virgin into a volcano, every inch of his skin lit up by it, the perfect, suspended instant when Nicke hurtled into his arms and buried his face screaming into his neck.

-

Heat was unmysterious. It was natural, a bodily function, like the need to masturbate, like the way his heart demanded exercise, like the way Nicke’s eyes went huge and dark every September when the rookies arrived, instincts buried over the summer kicking into overdrive.

Sasha could no more resent it than he could resent the form of his body, huge and dense and hungry.

Sasha could no more resent heat than he could resent Nicke for only getting a shadow of it, for not knowing deep in his bones how it felt when he gripped Sasha by the nape of his neck and hung on, brilliant in victory and alive all over and the only grain of sand too heavy for Sasha to carry on top of everything else.

One day this might be funny.

One day Sasha might tell his children about it, how he was already charring from the inside before he ever even touched the cup.

One day he might even tell Nicke.

-

Where Nicke broke his hand, deep in the second round, the whole locker room felt short of breath.

It was only Sasha who could even go near him, who could bear to take the force of his anger, silent and cold and emanating from him in waves. It was only Sasha, eleven years in, who could retrieve the gloves he’d dropped between his spread legs and kneel where they’d been and ask to see how bad it was.

The room didn’t do anything so dramatic as dissolve around them, but it had always felt as though getting close enough to Nicke for him to blot out the world was almost as good.

Sasha took his hand, spread the fingers, saw how broken it was and how little pain Nicke would let himself show. “What do you need?”

“You can unbreak my hand?” Nicke said, pitched just for Sasha, leaning down so the sweat-soaked mess of his hair brushed against Sasha’s forehead. “Time machine. Block the shot with my dick instead, maybe it hurts less.”

Sasha laughed at him. Somebody had to. “When is last time you even use your dick?”

“You’d know.” Nicke had fisted his other hand in Sasha’s hair and hung on, pain of it just right, grounding, Nicke’s to take if he wanted it.

Sasha had played without Nicke dozens of times.

“Stay nearby,” Sasha asked him, on his knees with Nicke holding him there. “You get better. We’re better when you close.”

He’d meant: _I’m_ better when you’re close.

-

“After me, I give it to you,” Sasha said, face pressed against Nicke’s, catching the sweat from his pale eyebrows, breathing in the scent from their steaming pads, yelling out the relief Sasha thought he’d never feel again, the sensation of something perfectly right.

“Yeah,” Nicke said, “yeah, okay, let’s do it,” voice already a wreck from screaming, and then he buried his face in Sasha’s shoulder, as though Sasha was the one who’d been holding him up all these years, and sagged into his arms.

Sasha had been injured before, had known, in some way, that there would be pain to follow, that there would be a reckoning for the soft snap of muscle, for the missing tooth, for the impact against the boards.

Just the same, he never felt it right away.

-

Nicke arrived for rookie camp when he was nineteen.

Sasha went to watch, wanting to see how he’d changed since he’d seen him last at worlds, when he’d been— a little out of reach, scent frosty, eyes huge and pale and guarded in their deep sockets.

He hadn’t been ready, or Sasha hadn’t been ready for him, or both.

Nicke had still looked edgeless, rounded off as though waiting for a space to fill.

He’d been so much bigger up close. Sasha had wondered what it would feel like to have him in the room, on the ice. He’d wondered what kind of alpha Nicke would grow into.

-

What Sasha felt most was noise; the pounding of music, the screams, the sheer rush of blood in his own ears.

His family, Nicke’s, other people’s children, a massive, endless crush of bodies.

What Sasha didn’t remember was the rest, the details, the order of succession of the team. Sasha was already too deep.

Sasha came back to himself in the basement of the MGM Grand shivering in the opulent bathroom, body finally catching the recoil.

Sasha came back to himself with Nicke’s broken fucking hand hot and slick against his cheek, burning even through the hard-earned thickness of his beard.

His face filled the whole of Sasha’s vision, a pale moon with deep-set eyes, green of his irises flooded away by the dilated blackness of his pupils. “When?” Nicke asked him, thumb skimming over his cheekbone, leaving hot, sparking traces behind it, fireworks buried in his skin.

Sasha was too far gone to speak, too drunk on everything — the whole overwhelming mess of it — to even tell him what had sent him over the edge, because right then it didn’t matter and he didn’t know, overcome with need so desperate it was like the first time all over again.

“Sasha.” Nicke pressed his forehead into his, close and hot and filling the whole world. He had never fully mastered gentleness, Sasha thought, words floating across the pool of his mind without a destination. Nicke gripped him by the back of the neck, hard enough to prove Sasha right. “How long?”

“I don’t know,” Sasha lied, because the answer was too big for the space between them, and if Sasha said _always_ Nicke would laugh. “You supposed to know, you tell me.”

Nicke grinned at him, too close to be anything but teeth and the packet of tobacco beneath his lip, the scent which leaked out of his pores in the morning when he was craving it.

Sasha knew what _want_ smelled like on him. Sasha knew what he tasted like. Maybe it would be different this time. Maybe victory would make it a little sweeter.

-

By the time Nicke fathered his second child, Sasha hadn’t been off birth control a day in his adult life.

Maybe Sasha could have envied him for the simplicity of his body, but he knew him too well by then to fall into that easy chasm. He had thought about it, sometimes: the complexities of starting a family, the ways he would have to contort himself to do it. He’d always wondered what he’d have done if he’d been less careful, or if his wife had asked him to be the one who carried instead of her.

Sasha couldn’t imagine not being able to choose. Another thing to ask Nicke about someday. Another question with no obvious form or words to hang it on.

-

Nicke barricaded the bathroom door with one of the gilded couches in the little atrium waiting area left scattered around like movie props for drunks to rest on while they waited for a stall.

Sasha watched him haul it under the knob with a vicious twist in his stomach, throb of blood in his ears spreading through the rest of him. His skin felt too tight over his bones, constraining and painfully untouched.

It looked effortless even left-handed. Sasha would have helped him, if he could have, if he could move or speak or do anything but what the heat demanded, the sickening openness of desire lancing through him like needles.

It had never been a death of a thousand cuts like this. Sasha had never been happy like this, had never lost track of himself, so unmoored that it came on spontaneously, need bursting out like lava pushing through cracks in the earth.

He must have made a noise. Nicke looked back at him, over his shoulder, sweat soaking his shirt to his spine and streaking into his hair again. “Take a breath,” he said, like he always did, before he gave the door a yank to see if it would budge. It rattled against the back of the couch and bounced back into the frame, leaving only the muffled pound of music, loud then soft, then — Nicke touched him again, and it disappeared, lost beyond the hard press of his lips to Sasha’s.

Sasha opened his mouth, tasting tobacco and champagne and metal, the lingering tang of the cup on both of their tongues, the acrid silver-polish taste of winning it all, at last, and then he tasted nothing but blood where Nicke bit him.

Sasha had never asked him softness, so any Nicke gave it felt like a gift, a pact between friends.

Nobody had ever laughed at him more than Nicke had, when Nicke had finally shown up in Washington. Nobody else had ever had the nerve to watch him throwing his body around and think it was funny instead of dangerous.

Nicke crowded him onto an overstuffed divan strewn with other people’s things, casualties of celebration and drunkenness, fingers already working at the buttons of his shirt.

It was Sasha who ripped it off, clumsy hands too impatient, body aching and empty and full to the brim with scathing joy.

He must have made a noise, a plea, maybe, while his throat could still produce words. Nicke shushed him with a thumb pressed to the bite in his lip. “Sasha. You have to breathe.”

Sasha breathed.

Nicke took the rest of his clothes off, saving them from what Sasha would have done to get them off his body, to get just that fraction closer to being skin-to-skin with him.

He felt slick all over, not just where he really was, slipping down and away from himself as Nicke pushed him back onto the stupid, fancy couch they were about to ruin, turning him over to spread him out.

Sasha hated not being able to see him. Nicke loved it when Sasha couldn’t watch. Over the years, it had become a game of urgency pushing against preference, and while Nicke could always have won, having only to wait out Sasha’s need, he didn’t press his advantage unless it was for a reason.

Sasha caught a glimpse of movement in the mirrors, set against the wall at the wrong angle to form a whole picture; distracted by the flash of red from Nicke’s shirt he didn’t expect the hot, terrible press of Nicke’s tongue against him before anything else, wetness on wetness and the strange rasp of his beard.

It wasn’t enough, until Nicke curled an arm around his hips and held him still.

Sasha breathed; he must have.

He pressed his face into the cushions, reaching back for any part of Nicke he could touch.

Nicke didn’t bother with his hands, except to hold Sasha steady, except to shove down the band of his shorts and free himself. All of this, Sasha didn’t see, except in refracted glimpses across the mirrors and from the way Nicke pulled him back by the hips, head of his cock hotter than any part of Sasha’s furious, immolent body.

How many times had Nicke entered him like this, artless and urgent?

Sasha could have counted them on one hand, if Nicke hadn’t taken hold of both his wrists, slick palms tight over his broad bones. The right one wouldn’t close all the way, but Sasha wouldn’t have tried to pull away.

He wouldn’t feel full until the heat was over, but even as Nicke moved, the agony of it receded.

Sasha wouldn’t find true relief for hours, if not days, but the reprieve was better for being fleeting, for being the first cresting wave of a flood.

Nicke thickened inside him, breathed out hot and sour against the back of his neck, and cursed violently at whoever was pounding on the door.

“We missing the party,” Sasha managed, Nicke’s weight against his back and Nicke trapped inside him, both of them crushed up against the awkward slant of something meant for one person reclining, not two.

Nicke let go of his wrist to scrape the hair back off Sasha’s forehead, easing them both over so they could almost lay down before facing the world again. “This is the party,” he said, mumbling into Sasha’s shoulder. “Fuck.”

Sasha wished they were face to face, or that he was on top, sitting astride Nicke’s wide hips, so he could look at him while he laughed. “I’m a party for you?”

Nicke hitched a breath against his back, wrapping an arm across his waist. “Who do you think has the cup?”

Sasha didn’t know. Sasha hoped it was close by, standing witness to their win.

 _Their_ win. Eleven years of _theirs,_ in all its messiness.

“It better not set anyone else off,” Nicke said, face still pressed against him, scratchy with his pathetic beard.

“Other alphas can handle it,” Sasha muttered, not wanting this to burst it, this small bubble of relief and safety by telling him it wouldn’t, that it wasn’t the cup any more than it was the air. “They learn.”

“They’re kids.”

“So?” Sasha wondered if Nicke even remembered himself at that age, whether he’d ever known how young he was. “Us, too.”

Nicke pinched him, too gently to be truly intended to silence him. He’d be wordless again soon enough, anyway. Heat always came in waves.

-

Sasha knew, possibly better than any of them, Nicke's reputation.

Maybe that was part of the privilege of being an alpha, that Nicke didn't have to care as much as Sasha did what people thought of him, how he presented himself, how his sarcasm came across as a kind of intractable arrogance to people who didn't know him.

It didn't help that he never disguised himself, never made quite enough concessions to propriety, staring people down without blinking, moving the way he did. It didn't help that he was private in his foolishness, that Sasha knew exactly what he looked and sounded and smelled like blind fucking blackout drunk and needy in his own right but hardly anyone else did. Sasha's love for him was a sideways one, overlaid by Nicke's responsibilities and Sasha’s own heart out on his sleeve and his needs the subject of so much debate it might as well have been part of his stat sheet in their stupid American measurements: 240 pounds, six-foot-three, doesn't feel right in a heat until someone is holding him down, until someone laughs at him, until someone's teeth break a little skin.

Nobody questioned Nicke's needs. People assumed them, and he let them. People assumed there was bad blood between them. People assumed the amount of blood was bad.

Sasha knew how joyful he was the first time they made the playoffs. Sasha remembered how he'd trembled the first time Sasha needed his help, and how he'd felt about it afterwards.

It wasn't strange anymore, that Nicke had been meant to grow into this, centring more than just lines on the ice. That didn't mean it never was, or that Nicke had never laid pressed against Sasha's back with his face buried between his shoulderblades, waiting for their bodies to free them from each other, pretending the hot wetness against Sasha's skin was just sweat.

It didn't mean Sasha had never felt guilty for wanting him, or for being furious that anyone could presume to know what Nicke wanted.

-

Last year—

Last year they had been on top of the world, or thought so.

“I think we can do it,” Nicke said to him in the shower one night, after a win they’d taken as if by right, watching Sasha soap himself up. Sasha was long past putting on a show for him. Nicke had seen every part, private and otherwise, and Sasha had never been shy, but it still felt good when Nicke looked him over, checking for bruises. Checking in.

Sasha flicked water at him. “You talk in here because you don’t want the kids to think you jinx it?”

Nicke dropped his towel and got under the spray, wetting his hair again to wash it. Sasha didn’t offer to help, just like he didn’t offer to do anything about Nicke’s halfway erection, absent, ambient arousal in his scent and his long cock thickened against his leg. It wasn’t the time, and Nicke had never asked him to.

“Jinxes aren’t real,” Nicke said, leaning against him, brushing at a new freckle on Sasha’s forearm. “I’m tired, maybe I just don’t want to deal with everyone else while I’m showering. Is this new?”

“Yeah.” Sasha left his arm looped over Nicke’s waist, sharing warmth. “It’s fine.”

Nicke stroked over it with wet fingers for a moment anyway, spreading the hair on Sasha’s arm flat with his thumb. “You’re overdue,” he said, leaning back against him, eyes half-closed.

“Maybe I have one before playoffs, we get lucky.”

Nicke laughed, a little bit more tension seeping out of him. He was never pliant, but he was always warm.

Last year they got knocked out in the second round.

Last year, Sasha’s heat pummelled him flat right after, pain and shock tipping him over the edge. In hindsight, maybe it was that one big hit, the grinding bruise all over his knee that set him off, or just sheer exhaustion. It might even have been anger, something Sasha had never managed to sit with quietly, just like resentment. It left a sour taste, a tense knot of regret twisted under the base of his skull.

Nicke came to see him right away, even though he must have been missing his flight to Europe for Worlds, climbing into bed and pushing him flat to the pillows with a hand right on the centre of his chest.

Even that contact had calmed him —the weight of him, his familiar shape, the anticipation of relief— but Sasha wasn’t an animal, high on suppressants and painkillers to take the edge off and still crackling with want. “Please don’t,” he’d managed.

Nicke buried his face in the side of his neck, breathing wet and open-mouthed against his skin. “Are you sure?”

Everything in Sasha had demanded otherwise, except for the small part which couldn’t stand it, the idea of taking this from him now when Nicke’s life out of sight was calling him too. Sasha couldn’t stand the idea of holding on to him for three days and asking him for more and more and more. “I have heats before you, you know.”

“I hate leaving you like this.”

“Hate _losing_ ,” Sasha admitted, swimming in scent, in the creeping need sinking hooks in him beyond the analgesic haze that had left him floating and loose.

“Me too.”

“So go win something,” Sasha said, reaching for his hand, laying his on top, trying not to grip down too hard. “Please.”

Sasha might have lost his resolve when Nicke nipped at the base of his throat, if he hadn't whispered _thank you_ into the bruise, barely loud enough to be heard.

-

Sasha must have been dozing.

He woke up to Nicke pulling out of him, still slick and hot but not urgent anymore, not yet. “You want to sleep more?” Nicke asked, hand warm and steadying on Sasha's hip. “We can go back to the hotel.”

“I don't want to miss it,” Sasha said, stretching out his numb right arm, blood coming back in a tingling rush. “We _won_.” It barely felt real, but then again hardly anything did, except for this, right now.

Nicke had a habit, or had formed one maybe, of stroking him. He ran a hand over Sasha’s ribs, up under his arm and back down again, seeming not to care about the cooling sweat, about the alcohol leaking out of them both, leaving Sasha only half drunk and still spinning. The inside of Sasha’s thighs were sticky, wet and smeared from Nicke pulling out.

The music filtered back through his mind, a distant thump like a heartbeat. Nicke stroked down over his flank, pushed his knee forward so he could keep petting him, down between his legs. Nicke liked to touch, to slip his fingers in after he’d fucked him the first time, to spread him open again. Sasha, already swollen and aching and a little bit dizzy, wanted to push back, to ask for more.

Nicke’s fingers were wet when he withdrew. Sasha was overheated already, but the thickness of his broken finger almost brought him back to the brink again. Only Nicke wouldn’t compromise for his own injury, wanting to feel what he’d done to Sasha with his stronger hand, to tease him just the right way. He never wanted Nicke to stop touching him. He wanted to take Nicke’s hand again and pull the delicate ends of his fingers into his mouth, feel the pads on his tongue.

Sasha, braced for it, still mourned the loss of contact when Nicke left him empty, getting up to get dressed while Sasha watched. Every inch of him was familiar, but somehow heat always made it new again, acres of unmarked skin, the heavy length of his cock, the way he looked at Sasha as though making sure he was still there, that he had stayed where Nicke put him.

Nicke draped his shirt over him, smile breaking across his face. “It’s a goner.”

“Give me yours.”

“In your dreams.”

“Some alpha.”

“You rip your own shirt off, you can’t ask for mine.”

The silence between them hadn’t always been comfortable, or easy. Once it had been limited by language, which had made it a victory every time they managed a few sentences, but now they both had plenty of words to use, and the silence was a choice. “You ever think we make it here?” Sasha asked him, when Nicke had found his shorts on the floor and handed them to him.

Nicke paused, still smiling helplessly, face transformed by it, flushed and damp. Sasha’s treacherous body gave a distant thrum, a precursor, a warning.

“I think we made it,” Nicke said, hauling Sasha upright by the arm. “We’re the fucking champions.”

“The kids will miss us.”

“I want to get drunk,” Nicke said, looking down at him, hands hovering just above Sasha’s shoulders. “Is that okay? Do you want to get drunk?”

“We already drunk.”

“I’m not.”

Sasha took his hands, both of them, cradling them together between his palms. “Why not?”

Nicke shrugged, staring at him, refusing to blink. “Sometimes it burns off, I think.”

“Sorry.”

Nicke let his hands be held. “Make it up to me. Let's get so wasted even I'll feel it.”

“Just like old times?”

Nicke leaned down, pitching his voice below the music, so Sasha had to work to hear. “Better. I want to wreck Las Vegas.”

-

Nicke took a shirt off a guy almost Sasha’s size with a look and a command, and, while Sasha was watching, swiped the sweat off his neck with it before he handed it over.

Nicke got him a drink, and watched him drink it, his eyes huge and dark again.

Gravity wells, Sasha thought. Places no light escapes from.

Sasha started throbbing again just after midnight.

Nicke took him to a dark corner, where anyone could have walked by, where teammates could have investigated, where people not too far gone to catch a scent could easily have watched.

The wallpaper smelled like glue and years of soaked-in alcohol and cigar smoke when Nicke shoved him into it, the music pounding in time to the thrust of his hips, phantom pressure against his legs and back and only Nicke’s fingers in him to stem the tide.

The wave crested, a molten, urgent surge, and then Nicke was leaning up on his toes to whisper in Sasha’s ear. “One more?”

Sasha couldn’t tell if he meant drinks, or fucks, or cups. Sasha could only nod and laugh, and smell it through his skin, taste it on his tongue when Nicke kissed a shot into his mouth.

-

Sasha wasn’t prone to road heats.

Some guys, the travel set them off sometimes, stress and bad away games and just not having their usual routine, their usual cocktail of hormonal exposure and training and food pushing them over the edge.

Sasha had been travelling more than he’d been home for thirteen years.

In all that time, he’d had a spontaneous road heat six times. Not a bad ratio.

He’d dreaded them, after the first one, before Nicke arrived.

After that it had been a different feeling. Not dread. Not happiness either, but something in between, a kind of suspended thankfulness that at least it was him, and at least it was easier.

The year he was out, Laich had offered to help out if Sasha needed it.

Sasha had thanked him, and vowed that if it happened and he was away from DC, from his girlfriend at the time or even from his set of gear at home, he’d take himself through it the old fashioned way, sobbing desperation and six pounds of lost sweat and a week of despondent exhaustion in the aftermath rather than let him.

-

Dawn crested without Sasha even noticing, buried underground in a cave of music and bodies and sweat.

He noticed when the whole team was dragged into the light like deep-sea fish, drunk and elated and blinking in the brightness of a desert sunrise.

Nicke had his phone. Nicke had his elbow, both of them leaning on each other, Sasha wondering when he’d given him his thumb to unlock it. “Who you’re texting?” Sasha asked, when someone herded them into the bus.

There were so many people. There were so many of their teammates, their boys; Burky laughing into Djoos, Vrana and Kemper stumbling on together, the cup, settled next to them, cradled against Sasha’s other shoulder.

“Your wife,” Nicke mumbled, left thumb tapping awkwardly at the glass. “She says she’s on her plane, look.” Nicke angled the phone towards him. “I told her you’re in heat.”

Sasha’s phone pinged. Nicke laughed. “She says you better not get knocked up.” He hit the call button, aiming the camera at them.

She picked up on the first chime, face filling the screen. She looked flushed and elated. Maybe they all did, even Sasha, whose flush was mechanical, hereditary, imperative. He could feel himself smiling and was too tipsy and warm to care how stupid it might look to anyone else. Here she was, checking in on him too, laughing gently at them when Nicke spoke to her first, voice scratched out from screaming along to the music. “He’s fine. I caught it a few hours late, but we’re getting through it.”

“Good,” she said, looking at Sasha and switching to Russian. “He’s being good to you?”

“He always is.”

“Bring him home if you need to.”

“Come meet us at the party,” Sasha mumbled, before Nicke’s tolerance for his behaviour ran out and he took over again, angling the phone away. Sasha could hear them speaking, discussing something with a few laughs peppered in between, Nicke’s other hand curled warm and sweaty over his knee.

He passed out on his shoulder until he woke up in the plane with his phone wedged into his hand and Nicke's feet shoved territorially into his lap. Nicke had taken off his pants, acres of pale, smooth skin weighing Sasha down.

Sasha wrapped a hand around one of his skinny ankles and squeezed.

-

Nicke left him alone for just long enough to calm Andre down, because somebody had to.

Sasha checked for the others, but Carly was unconscious on a banquette with a beer still in his hand and Djoos wasn’t pulling his weight, or at least not to Nicke’s satisfaction.

Sasha watched, a thrum of jealousy deep in his chest when Nicke threw Andre off his seat and held him on the crumb-strewn floor with all of his considerable weight, broad back flexing as Andre played at struggling.

Nicke said something to Djoos that Sasha didn’t catch, but there was no other heat-scent in the air yet, just him, just everyone picking up on it, staying a careful arm’s length away from him until Nicke’ hackles went down.

Sasha watched, starting to itch, wetness beginning to build again, a deep ache in the pit of his stomach.

Beags threw himself into the seat opposite Sasha, blocking his view of Nicke making choking Andre with his thighs a teachable moment, waving gently. “How you doing?”

Sasha tried to focus on him and almost succeeded. “Beags. We won it.”

“Yeah we fucking did.” Jay had a nice smile, Sasha thought, fixating on it, breathing out all the way before breathing back in. Beags waved again, catching the rest of his attention. “You need anything?”

Sasha shook his head. What he needed, he didn’t want from him, and couldn’t get anyway.

Beags tossed him a protein bar. “Can you eat it?”

“Nicke gonna kill you,” Sasha said, but he peeled it open anyway, crackle of the foil loud in his ears.

“Nick is distracted,” Beags said. “And he’s terrible at food.”

It tasted like nothing, but Sasha couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten, and whatever he could chew and swallow was better than nothing. Beags was right, anyway. Nicke ate like shit, and Sasha wasn’t in any place to remember to feed himself.

His hands were starting to shake again, need cracking through him, urgent as though it had never receded, when Nicke appeared behind Jay’s shoulders, eyes huge and dark, all his little teeth on display.

“I told you,” Sasha rasped, completely unable to even look at Beags when Nicke was in sight, focus drawn to him the instant he returned. “You in his seat.”

“Leave,” Nicke bit out.

The rest of the plane went silent, receding into the background, the only sound penetrating through the haze creeping back over Sasha the sound of Nicke’s low, rasping breaths. Beags tossed Sasha a bottle of water and got up, bumping Nicke in the shoulder as he made himself scarce.

Nicke had plenty of self-control, but even Sasha kind of wanted to take his arm off for it.

Maybe they should have found a bed. There were a few, nestled along the sides of the cabin, with their own little doors, space enough to recline all the way. Maybe they should have done a lot of things, but Sasha let Nicke pull him into his lap right there in the middle of everyone, let him bite down on his bare shoulder and shove his sweatpants off down his thighs.

Sasha might have —on a different day, in a different heat— asked for it to be private, the way Nicke worked him wet and open and slid Sasha down onto him, guiding himself in. He might have objected if Nicke hadn’t taken his weight, chest to chest, or let Sasha settle his face in the crease of his neck, murmuring Swedish nonsense into his hair.

-

Their first heat together had been arranged.

Sasha had come into practice a little on edge. He couldn’t remember why, now. It wasn’t important, no matter how much whatever it was had set him off at twenty-one. Either way, he’d come in upset about something and playing through it, and — it must have been Boudreau by then— their coach had taken him aside and asked what was bothering him, asked him if he wanted to get checked out.

He hadn’t wanted to, but it also hadn’t been a question.

Sasha went in, got checked out, tried to concentrate, because maybe there was something going on someone else might see that he couldn’t.

“And when was the last time you had a heat?”

Sasha zoned back in. “I— not sure. Not too long. Last year, maybe.”

“You’re irregular?” The trainer frowned. “Who took you through it?”

Sasha thought it should have been on the record, just so he wouldn’t have to talk about it. It was bad enough to be asked, and worse that he didn’t have a good answer. “Olie.”

The trainer wrote something down on his file. “How was it? Good fit?”

Sasha shrugged. It had fit, for sure. He had just felt unseen, a body detached from its passenger, a sensation he’d never sought and didn’t know what to do with; he was his body. His body was him. _He_ had heats, and wasn’t separate from them. He didn’t like to feel like a collection of buttons to press, a mechanical object, a thing to be fixed. “I can be alone, also. Is okay, I do it before.”

The trainer read through a few pages of something on his computer, face neutral and pleasant, before he refocused on Sasha. “I think it would be better if you kept to a regular schedule. Twice a year seems to work for people with an irregular cycle, once during the season, let the stress out, and once in the summer, you know, if you have a girlfriend or something, reconnect.”

Sasha had known in that moment that this person had never experienced a heat firsthand, and had no fucking clue what he was talking about. Heat was just _heat._ Reconnecting? Letting the stress out? It was a fucking throwback, something that shot off like a misfire, a hormonal burden Sasha shouldered like plenty of other people. It just _happened._

Sasha was searching for some kind of reasonable response when the trainer said: “We can induce you, if you want. Put you on a schedule. You’re up to date on your contraceptives, so it shouldn’t be an issue. We could set it up so Backstrom takes you through it, see how that works out.”

“You ask him about it?” Sasha blurted out. “He wants to?”

The trainer wrote a reminder, unperturbed by Sasha’s tone. “Think about it,” he said. “We’ll talk to Backstrom.”

-

He didn’t speak to Nicky about it right away, but he did speak to Sanya Semin. Maybe for the perspective of home, or maybe just because Sema didn’t give a fuck about the trainers and never had.

“They want me to try a heat with Nicky.”

Sema didn’t react at first, too busy with his head and shoulders fully in his road bag, doing something to his clothes Sasha didn’t want to think about. He pulled himself out to glance at Sasha. “Sorry, were you talking?”

Sasha repeated himself, turning on the TV to mute the awkward silence that followed.

“They can’t make you,” Sema said, with uncharacteristic caution. Then: “When are you ever in heat, anyway?”

“I’m in heat sometimes.” There was no reason to get defensive about it. If anything it was a blessing, that Sasha wasn’t volatile the way he might be. It didn’t matter that he was irregular enough to comment on, if he wasn’t trying to plan a family. Why did it matter so much? “You one of those idiots that think we can only fuck when we’re in heat?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“I know. Sorry.”

“If you’re not in heat then what’s the problem?”

That was the question; why even suggest it, before it was an issue? “They ever ask you? Take someone through it, in Portland?”

Sema kicked his bag away and came to sit on the bed opposite Sasha, messy and disarrayed as ever, big hands hanging down between his skinny legs. Sasha was always glad he was around, when he was around. He was never happy when the team sent him back to the minors, because it never made sense, turfing someone so talented for reasons that really had nothing to do with his hockey. It made Sasha nervous.

“Coaches asked me if I took so many penalties because I’ve got—” he lifted his fingers, spaced out to measure a distance, an amount— “too much aggression.”

Sasha knew Sema better than well, or at least as close to that as Sema let anyone know him. That was a yes in more circular words, a confirmation without admission. There might have been nobody on the team with _less._ “They think I’m moody because I haven’t had a heat this year.”

Semin grinned at him, grim and laughing. “You win.”

“They want to set me off.”

“And pair you up with the rookie, set up a good breeding line, two nice prize dogs?”

“This is why you’re always getting sent down.”

“Are you sure they’re not going to ask you to pull out your implant? Tell you you’ll only feel a pinch?”

“I'm not going to do that.” Sasha couldn’t even try to parry Sema’s insult. It wasn’t aimed at him, anyway. If he and Nicky were dogs, so was he. “What if I asked you to do it?”

Sasha could almost imagine it, if he tried. He didn't have to keep trying for long, though, because Sema got off the bed and crowded into his space, lifting his face with both hands, standing wiry and strong between his knees. Sema kissed him for the first time in St. Louis, Missouri, in a hotel room that smelled like socks and Sema‘s illicit cigarettes and the acrid hotel shampoo. Sasha kissed him back, but only for an instant before Sema pulled away. “Absolutely not,” Sema told him. “I do it once, for you, and then what? We’re locked in, and they keep me around just to stick my dick in whoever needs it?”

“It wouldn't be like that.”

“It’s already like that,” Sema said, still cradling his face, palms warm and wide and rough. “And this is just a game.”

“Maybe for you.”

“Maybe for Nicky, too,” Sema pointed out. “You ask him about it?”

Sema was gone now, happier in Russia, and Nicke was still here.

-

Sasha never dreamed during a heat.

He didn’t dream all that often anyway, and when he did it was usually the ironic kind of stress dream, the ones where all his remaining teeth fell out, or he was falling, falling, falling.

He fell asleep on the plane with his face buried in the cup, metallic, hot-silver scent of it burning itself through his body.

If he ever had a heat on the road again, he’d have this in the back of his mind forever, the mingled mess of barely-washed bodies leaking booze and sweat and joy all at once.

Sasha had broken his nose so many times he sometimes didn’t consciously notice scent at all, but heat turned everything liquid and molten and tangible, something thick and heady he could almost taste.

Rest lasted long enough for Nicke to take a picture of him and fucking tweet it, because Nicklas Backstrom’s sense of humour was a strange, twisted thing that Sasha only really understood at best two-thirds of the time. 

Landing in DC felt false, like he’d conjured it from his imagination and manifested it whole: crowds, cheering, the antithesis of a brave-faced defeat. Sasha wanted to drink it down along with the beer Nicke kept handing him, to pour it out on everyone he saw.

Maybe he wouldn’t have imagined Nicke helping him hoist the cup with his broken hand while he was clutching a bundle of miscellaneous crap and phone wires in his left, but if he’d imagined it, it would definitely have been Nicke, all the same.

_Hey DC. We are coming in hot!_

-

Nicke took him home at lunchtime, or climbed in the car with him and the cup and the driver and held him up in the backseat, letting himself be filmed when Sasha filmed it.

Nicke’s smile had the manic quality of the very tired, his eyes bright and wet and a little bit distant. Sasha was more drunk than sober and Nicke was more than that, both of them reeling together.

Sasha’s mother took one look at them at the door and laughed, inviting the cup’s minder in for tea and shouting for someone to come and translate, since Sasha was indisposed.

She sent them upstairs to bathe, steering them around the crowd of people in Sasha’s back garden, waiting to congratulate them, to share the joy.

Nicke poured him into a bath and climbed in behind him, hissing at the temperature of the water.

Steam filled Sasha’s lungs, filled the room. He had always loved water, being a different kind of wet, buoyant and warm.

Nicke groaned faintly, sound of it travelling right through Sasha’s spine before Sasha’s wife slipped it to join them with a sweating bottle of champagne under her arm, perching on the side of the deep tub, slim hand dipping into the water to flick a few droplets on Sasha’s face.

“I missed you,” Sasha told her, suffused with contentment. Even the rush of heat was better when she was near, when she could touch him too.

“I missed you, too,” she said, before taking Nicke’s hand where it laid over the lip of the bath and switching to English. “How long now?”

“A while, I think.” Nicke answered for him, other arm looped over Sasha’s middle, broken finger going red in the heat. Fuck, that had been inside him. Nicke had done that for him. Sasha sank into the sensation of being held, the softness of his chest and the way he was half-hard, solid and familiar, and the sound of his voice, washing over him. “Maybe one more day.”

She had such a beautiful smile, even the one she kept for Nicke, who Sasha trusted implicitly and without condition, but would never be fully able to explain. “You’re drinking?”

“I’ve been drunk since Vegas,” Sasha mumbled, not making an effort to stick to English. Nicke would figure it out. “You want to join us?”

She rolled her eyes, popping the cork so the spray of foam that followed splashed into the water in a fizzing arc, soaking them with it. The smell was familiar now; Sasha wondered if he’d ever find it less thrilling, this new sensation of victory: lightness and cold champagne. Laughter and the sour taste of beer, the press of dozens of bodies, or just these two, his largeness and her long hands and bright laugh.

She drank straight from the bottle and then held it out for him, just in time for Nicke to hold him still and stroke him open again, fingers hotter than the bath, working in where Sasha was slicker than the water.

“You will sleep here?” She asked, when champagne had spilled down Sasha’s chin from his open mouth, before pressing a kiss to his shoulder. Sasha didn’t say anything, taking her hand when she put the bottle down to kiss the tip of her fingers, cool from the glass. It was Nicke she was asking.

“No,” he said, teasing Sasha just a bit too slowly, lazy, shallow strokes, soft and terrible. The movement of his wrist dragged against Sasha’s soft cock, even that a distraction. “I think a little bit, then we’ll go out.”

“You want to go out?” She pulled a little at Sasha’s lip, where Nicke had bitten him.

Sasha did, and Nicke told her, leaving Sasha to sink into the touch.

Sometimes, even now, Sasha wished he got hard during heat, wished there was some kind of tangible way to measure the sensation against the rest of his life. Some people did, but he never had. Nicke had almost asked, the first time he’d seen the piercing, the autumn after Sasha got it on a whim, wanting a little bit more of a reminder that heat was never everything, except when it was happening. He hadn’t, in the end, but Sasha had learned to read into his silences since the first time.

The first time— no, their first time together— Nicke had pulled his lip between his teeth, Sasha’s knees warming under his palms where he was holding them apart, just… looking.

If Sasha hadn’t already been running a fever he might have burned up just from mortification, the way Nicke was frowning at him.

“What?” Sasha had managed, laid back on a pile of pillows that smelled terrible, whatever detergent they’d been using at Kettler suddenly awful, his teeth clenched against each other so hard he’d thought he might crack them. “Something wrong?”

Nicke ran a finger up between his legs, slowly, gently, barely skimming where Sasha wanted them to go before cupping his balls, taking hold of the base of Sasha’s soft, sensitive cock and squeezing, stroking up to the head, thumbing at it with a faint frown. “Do you even like it, I touch this?”

Sasha didn’t know what to say. Sasha wasn’t always at his best when he was aching, or when he was surprised. “Is your first time or something?”

Sasha couldn’t have known then that it was, if nobody had thought to tell him beforehand. Nicke hadn’t told him. Maybe he should have guessed from the way Nicke paid attention to every detail, every small sound and every brush against another teammate between surges, shielding him with his body when someone dragged them out of their room for food.

Nobody had ever asked him what he _liked_ before.

He maybe should have asked what Nicke liked, but sometimes learning came in waves, too.

Water sloshed over the rim of the tub when Sasha kicked back against him, making the best of being close to speechless with want. Nicke would figure it out, and it made both of them laugh, these two people he loved, whose truce mattered most to him.

-

Maybe Sasha should have noticed before now that all nightclubs smelled the same, but then again, maybe all he was smelling was Nicke and himself, mingled every time Nicke circled back around from checking on everyone in an ever-devolving state of drunkenness, leaning up against Sasha’s back and breathing into his neck when he needed it.

Parties would never be this good again.

Sasha would never want to be touched with this intensity again. It would be impossible to replicate: the newness of this particular kind of joy, the fierce, inexorable want dragging him into its undertow, rolling him over and over and over. Being sated and brought back to the edge, losing track of time and people, but never the cup, and never Nicke.

People peeled off, paired off, went to bed, and when dawn came Sasha still had the cup and he still had Nicke, and a cop had to pour them into a cab.

On the way back to Sasha’s house, Nicke kissed him.

It didn’t matter that it was gentle, or that Nicke was drunk too, finally, dizzy enough to stumble.

It mattered that he wanted to, and that Sasha wanted to let him.

Dawn had become morning by the time they made it back to bed, Nicke standing back a bit as Sasha’s family greeted them, laughed at them, already up and having breakfast. Sasha knew it must have pained him. Nicke was what he was, and Sasha was riding the last of his heat with the scent of hundreds of other people on him, strangers and teammates and loved ones alike.

Sasha could almost feel it, how much it was costing him to stay at a bit of distance.

“Go to bed,” someone said, freeing them from the breakfast table. Sasha couldn’t have said who it was, swaying on his feet until Nicke came to take his weight, only stumbling a little as they leaned on each other to get up the stairs with the cup propped awkwardly between them.

-

Sasha’s bed was empty.

It wasn’t just his bed anymore, but she must have known they’d need the space.

Later there would be a time to ask her the questions Sasha had never managed to answer for himself. Maybe he’d give a few answers of his own, to make himself think about it.

Later they’d go out and keep on celebrating. Sasha could almost picture it, a haze of warm hangovers, everyone in DC joining in.

Nicke heaved the cup upright by the side table and closed the blackout blinds, leaving Sasha to strip and fall face-first into the mattress, room beginning to spin.

Nicke flopped down next to him, dragging clumsily at him until Sasha’s head ended up on his bare chest, almost side to side except where Nicke was taking his weight.

Sasha could hear his heart, and his breath, and the way he sighed out: “Fuck. I’m so fucking drunk.”

“Is what you wanted, no?”

He’d have memories of this, probably, the soupy darkness of a false night, the stale taste of beer and the wetness of sweat-soaked hair and under it all, the echo of urgency. Sasha ached all over, raw from being held up against sticky walls, from the barely-enough rhythm they’d mastered like a no-look pass. He ached and wanted and wasn’t sure which he’d still feel when he woke up again.

“I wanted to celebrate,” Nicke murmured. “Not end up locked in a room for three days.” Nicke seemed to realise what he’d said an instant later, breath hitching in his chest. “‘M sorry,” he mumbled. “Not your fault.” He moved before Sasha could think of anything to say; it wasn’t his fault anymore than he could help needing to eat, but— Nicke pulled him closer, rolled until they were face to face again, forehead to forehead, like an eternity ago on the ice. They were still almost as soaked, maybe both still feeling a thread of that elation. “Only you could make this into perfect timing,” Nicke managed, sounding out his words like he used to when his English was still slow.

Maybe it was the darkness, or the alcohol, or Nicke right there, the perfect, familiar scent of him filling every breath that made Sasha reckless. “It was you. On the ice. Been so long, and then we won, and you were first one there.”

“So it could have been anyone.”

“No.” Sasha had never needed alcohol for honesty, but sometimes it was a leveller. “Just you.”

Nicke laid a hand on his cheek again, as though to feel the shape of him, pressing into his skin. “Best party we could have had,” he said, finally. “One more?”

“Cups or fucks?”

“Both.”

Sasha shouldn’t laugh, but Nicke could cope with being laughed at.

Nicke hauled Sasha’s thigh up, casually proprietary, grip just the right side of too hard. Sasha loved it like this, when he could see his face, every little crease of his lips, the faint lines appearing around his eyes, the way his mouth fell open when he guided himself in with one long, slow push.

It didn’t matter that they never found a steady rhythm, or that Sasha always wanted to pull him closer, to find a way to make it last, even when Nicke dug his nails into Sasha’s back, even when Sasha started shuddering, too ready to find the only relief his body would let him have.

He’d always wondered what it would look like, if he came all over him, what it would taste like to lick it off, how it might feel to take him into his mouth instead, just because he wanted to.

It would be different. Sasha couldn’t say whether it would be so different, not when Nicke cursed softly against his skin as Sasha clenched down around him, a familiar, whispered litany of profanity that had taught Sasha all the Swedish he knew.

-

Sasha’s heat broke sometime as he was falling asleep with Nicke still inside him, thick and long and perfectly familiar. Both of them were too exhausted to find the easiest position to sleep in. Sasha’s left leg was numb, trapped under Nicke’s hip, Nicke’s hair tickling his nose where he was curled in towards Sasha’s chest, as though his sleeping body had finally remembered Sasha was the bigger of them, and didn’t really need to be protected.

-

**Author's Note:**

> THIS FIC MENTIONS WIVES AND PARTNERS. Not by name, so you can feel free to imagine Ovi’s wife is not really Ovi’s Wife, but she does show up. YMMV! I have always found a/b/o fascinating in still adhering to our construction of gender so find within a little bit of playing around.
> 
> All credit to Ovi having a dick piercing to Jolach, who as usual is the standard of filth against which we all must measure ourselves.
> 
> If you liked it, comments keep the writing elves alive!


End file.
